Again with the Dress Codes and the Idiots in Charge.

It may be a little late in the year to start collecting nominations for the Curmie Award, which we missed altogether last year, but since education has been and will always be a central topic of Curmie’s blog, I’m going to talk about this story whether there’s an award nomination down the line or not.

Summer Bond in the offending garment.

It is, alas, a familiar story of high school dress codes and administrators who get their jollies by forcing students—well, some students—to conform to arcane, archaic, and profoundly sexist regulations. A young woman named Summer Bond (she’s identified only as “Summer” in all the news stories, but her lawyer uses her full name in a press release, so Curmie will do so, as well) was suspended and, apparently, not allowed to participate in her graduation ceremony from Hickory Ridge High School in Harrisburg, NC, presumably for wearing the shirt you see in the picture on the left. Yes, really. Or perhaps for “insubordination” for not prostrating herself before Petty Tyrant Executive Moron Principal Michelle Cline, bellowing mea culpas at the top of her lungs. Whatever. Fact is, it’s stupid.

Let’s get some stuff out of the way in a hurry. First, the dress code is (of course) an exercise in sexism. Girls mustn’t distract boys by, you know, looking attractive or fashionable. Obviously, there are legitimate functions of a dress code: no school wants gang signs or explicit bigotry on clothing, and it’s true that see-through tops or similar manifestations are at best unprofessional and at worst disruptive. OK, fine. But Curmie went to high school with some very beautiful young women who routinely (it being the ‘70s) wore skirts that wouldn’t come close to passing Hickory Ridge’s current dress code, and still managed to keep his mind on his courses. The “no cleavage” rule might work at a high school in North Carolina, but it wouldn’t last a day at virtually any university in the country. Curiously, students across the gender spectrum manage to concentrate.

We have further evidence of the gender-based nature of the school’s dress code in this reporting from WCNC in Charlotte: “earlier this year, 45 girls were brought into the principal’s office just because they were wearing leggings without shirts that were long enough.” (For the record, on any given day, about half the women in Curmie’s department would be similarly dressed.) Curiously, there are no reports from Hickory Ridge of boys violating the dress code. Go figure.

OK, Curmie gets it. The fact that high school dress codes are designed to blame girls for boys’ behavior is old news. Moving on. Other things to note up front:

• The fact that Summer is an excellent student is irrelevant. She could be barely passing, and the injustice would be just as manifest.
• She will, of course, graduate, although she may not walk. Even Michelle Cline isn’t stupid enough to risk the kind of damages that lawsuit would inevitably precipitate.
• She was never in danger of losing (note correct spelling, please, multiple sources) her scholarship to “a major university.” Any university that would give any credence to the petulant grandstanding of a two-bit high school principal instead of Ms. Bond’s grades, board scores, and recommendations is unworthy of attendance.
• There seems to be some history between Summer, her mom, and Principal Cline. This would appear to be at the center of the controversy.

Assuming the news reports are correct, here’s what happened: Principal Cline approached Summer at lunch (note that apparently no one had complained all morning), demanding that she put a jacket on over her top. Summer protested that there was nothing wrong with what she was wearing, but a friend loaned her a jacket, which she put on. We’re done, right? No, apparently that wasn’t enough, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.  One source suggests that (according to Cline) Summer's lower back still wasn’t covered, making that top the strangest shaped garment in history, but whatever…

Anyway, Cline then demanded that Summer change clothes altogether, but—because of that chronic tension mentioned earlier—there was apparently an arrangement (or merely a maternal insistence?) that Summer could not be punished in any way without her mom being notified first. So, with the school’s inability to contact the mom, we’re done, right? Nope. Cline throws everyone else out of a school assembly, calls in an armed School Resource Officer, and threatens Summer with arrest (!) for… uh… well, something. The mom called the school back just in time, but Summer was still suspended for ten days and threatened with expulsion.

OK. Analysis time. Notice that the local story from WCNC says that the problem is that Summer’s shirt “rests just off the tops of her shoulders and exposes her collarbone.” The HuffPost article specifically states that Summer was “suspended for wearing a shirt that showed her collarbones.” Curiously (not really) the school’s vaunted dress code, which school officials would have us believe descended from Mount Sinai to a trumpet fanfare, has nary a word about collarbones. Imagine Curmie’s surprise. The closest thing to an actual violation on Ms. Bond’s part is in fact a pure judgment call: the dress code demands that “all shirts should adequately cover the upper body including the shoulders…” Summer’s shoulders were covered, but one might reasonably quibble over the definition of “adequately.” As a side note, the WCNC’s Tanya Mindes wore a shoulder-revealing top as she reported from the scene. One suspects that viewers were somehow able to listen to what she was saying. (Curmie has wondered repeatedly over the years about what is so inappropriate about shoulders: here, here, and here, for example.)

It’s also worth noting that a suspension of more than two days for a dress code violation is allowed only for the sixth offense, but that the same student handbook gives carte blanche to school administrators to do pretty much whatever they want for some pretty ill-defined offenses. It’s another “Fuck You, We’re the Administration” clause. The order of the violations which can lead to suspension is telling. Here are the most egregious violations:

• 1. Being a persistent discipline problem.
• 2. Failure to report to the Control Room.
• 4. Disrespect to an Administrator.

More minor offenses—you know, stuff like actual crimes—are also included. Stealing is #11, vandalism is #12, bringing a weapon to school is #15, fighting is #16, drugs and alcohol #17. But the really important stuff to the school is at the top, and Curmie suspects that anything short of abject obeisance is going to be regarded by the likes of Michelle Cline as disrespect. It isn’t. Disrespect is what Curmie feels and expresses towards you, Ms. Cline, you heinous, bullying, buffoon.

English News and the Twittering Twit

The big news from the United Kingdom as Curmie writes this is the election, which is currently predicted to result in a serious blow to the ruling Tory party: possibly, even probably, as of this writing, a hung parliament. Curmie is reminded of a line often attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

Britons have, perhaps, had enough of the profound incompetence, moral bankruptcy and intellectual cowardice of Theresa May. She may be able to cobble together a coalition, perhaps even retain a majority, but her power play of calling an election (having pledged not to do so) to consolidate her party’s majority in Parliament has, like everything else she’s set her hand to, failed miserably. Even Fox News is calling the prospect of a plurality rather than a majority for the Conservatives a “Crippling political defeat.” A senior Tory official told The Telegraph (the most right-leaning of the legitimate British news sources), “This is bad, it's worse than bad. Her advisers should walk out of the door now never to return, regardless of the final result. They should be banished forever.”

Um… wow. What’s really significant about this is that any result short of the Tories maintaining a comfortable ruling margin would be an enormous surprise. Even a few days ago, when Curmie was in London, there was an aura of castles in the air to Labour-supporting friends’ hopes for a legitimate insurgency. It’s still unlikely that Jeremy Corbyn will be moving into #10 Downing Street anytime soon, but what was once a pipe dream is now, in theatre terminology, a playable objective. That’s still unlikely, but Curmie’s guess is that he’s about as likely to be the new Prime Minister as Theresa May is to retain the job. Best guess is that the Prime Minister in a few weeks’ time will be a Tory whose name isn’t Theresa May. We shall see.

Indeed, the longshot status of any meaningful Labour threat allowed the week’s news to be dominated by last weekend’s terrorist attack on and near London Bridge. Curmie wasn’t in the immediate area where the attacks occurred, but did cross London Bridge (by train) only nine days before the incident. A couple of things are striking about that affair. First: the casualty count. Eight people were killed, and dozens injured. That’s horrible, but imagine how much worse it would have been here, where the perpetrators could have bought about any weapon imaginable, including assault rifles and grenade launchers, providing only that their credit card went through.

Check out the guy on the right.  Dammit, he paid for that pint!

There were multiple tales of heroism, ranging from Roy Larner, the not-entirely-sober man who took on the three murderers bare-handed, screaming “Fuck you, I’m Millwall,” to the unnamed gentleman who may have been willing to evacuate a particular area but would be damned if he’d leave his pint behind, to Richard Angell, a witness to the events, who told the BBC, “If me having a gin and tonic with my friends, flirting with handsome men, hanging out with brilliant women, is what offends these people so much, then I’m going to do it more, not less. Because that’s what makes London so great….”

All told, Curmie has spent about a year in the UK: most of it working on a Master’s degree in Birmingham, but probably a couple of months in London, which retains a special place in my heart. There is a spirit to London unduplicated by any other city I’ve ever visited. It is, after all, the place that withstood the Blitz, in which some 18,000 tons of high explosives were dropped on England (mostly, but not exclusively, on London) over an 8-month period. Over 40,000 English civilians were killed, and nearly ten times that many were rendered homeless. Did the Blitz have its desired effect of weakening English resolve? Uh, no. Quite the opposite, in fact. Britons pulled together as never before; “business as usual” was the ultimate act of defiance.

So when John Oliver ripped into the American media’s characterization of the UK as “reeling” or “under siege,” he was absolutely correct: “In no way is Britain under siege. Is it upset? Yes. Is it pissed off? Oh, you fucking bet it’s pissed off. But to say it’s under siege and its people are reeling is to imply that it’s somehow weak enough to be brought to its knees by three monumental arseholes.”

Speaking of arseholes, no description of the events in London would be complete without mention of our National Embarrassment, the Petulant Yam, whose tweetstorm served, once again, to prove to the world that the so-called “leader of the free world” is unfit to be the assistant manager at a small-town McDonald’s. Any normal person, let alone a presumed statesman in an international spotlight, would respond to the events on and around London Bridge first by offering condolences, support, and perhaps prayers. Not our Donny. First response: a self-serving, xenophobic, and tone-deaf tweet: “We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!”

Seven minutes later he sent an appropriate tweet, offering the support missing from the early missive. Miracles do happen.

Needless to say, the fit of statesmanship and, dare I say, sanity, didn’t last. First, it was picking a fight with London mayor Sadiq Khan because, well, because it was already 6:31 a.m., and our Imperial Brat hadn’t been a world-class assclown yet that day (last Sunday). Please note that what Mayor Khan had said was that Londoners should not be alarmed by the increased police presence (Side note: there was nothing but praise for London’s first responders from literally every person-on-the-street interviewee.). Naturally, DJT actively misinterpreted the mayor’s comments in a snotty tweet: “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’” There is, of course, some reason to doubt the authenticity of this particular tweet: it was spelled correctly, after all.

Twelve minutes later, Twitter Boy outdid even himself for stupidity, calling attention to the fact that the terrorists had a van and some knives rather than a gun. To a sane person, this would mean that it’s a good thing a trio of murderous yahoos didn’t have access to firearms. In what passes for a brain in our estimable President, however, it’s somehow an indictment of gun laws. Don’t work too hard trying to figure that one out, Dear Reader; it’ll only make you crazy.

Then more yelping about his wildly unconstitutional travel ban, more whining about Mayor Khan, and on and on about security and blahblahblah. Needless to say, Orange Grifter casually overlooked the cuts to police orchestrated by… wait for it… Theresa May. Indeed, last weekend’s attack may well have had a silver lining. Certainly no one Curmie ever wants to meet is happy about what happened, but it now appears inevitable that whoever the Prime Minister will be next month, it won’t be the totally inept Theresa May. If, in politics, the enemy of your enemy is your friend, then Trump and May are conjoined in their opposition to (or by, depending on your point of view) Sadiq Khan. In other words, Donald Trump does have a positive purpose: aligning himself with like-minded buffoons and thereby making them unelectable. And here you were thinking he’d be more use as a speed bump…

Musings on the Jester's Privilege

Yes, it has indeed been almost a year since Curmie wrote anything here. I didn’t even get a post written up for the Curmie Awards. I could blame the new job (which I’ll soon be able to give up), but that wouldn’t really be accurate. Yes, I’ve been more tired at the end of the week, and more interested in watching something escapist on Netflix than in previous years, but I haven’t actually been working more hours this year than previously. Nor was the problem a lack of subject matter: quite the contrary, in fact. There’s been a surfeit of material that would make even a less curmudgeonly person than I a little grumpy.

And there was the Presidential election between the two least ethical major party candidates—at least as a tandem—in history. In the last thing Curmie posted on this blog, he sort of endorsed Jill Stein, who turned out to be an utter wackadoodle, despite being more aligned with Curmie on most issues than either of the Machiavellian and utterly corrupt front-runners; Gary Johnson proved to be an ignorant fool, too, so Curmie held his nose and voted for Hillary Clinton against the puerile and petulant grifter we ended up with. The Trump administration seems bent on destroying literally everything of value to the population as a whole—the environment, the education system, the Bill of Rights…—so narrowing the field to concentrate on one topic of particular interest or one act of especial malevolence isn’t easy.

But mostly, the reason I haven’t written anything is that I’ve been lazy, or at least too lazy to write my usual long-form posts of 1500 words or so. The result is that the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page has been updated frequently with other people’s work, but not my own. I haven’t pounced on a story that’s really still in the news, making it very difficult to say anything that hasn’t already been said at least as well as I could say it, so I never finished a couple of essays I started. And inertia just kept getting harder and harder to overcome. But, as Sally Bowles sings in Cabaret, maybe this time.

There have been three incidents of late that have brought to the forefront the concept of the Jester’s Privilege, the principle by which comedians fall into a special category, having not merely the right but indeed the obligation to speak a brutal truth without fear of reprisal. The first of these events took place about a month ago, when Stephen Colbert issued his “cock holster” barb, which followed a few seconds after labelling the President a “pricktator.”

Next was Kathy Griffin’s already-infamous “beheading” (right) of President Trump in a photo shoot. She’s shown holding a bloodied replica of DJT’s head.

And finally, there was the latest Bill Maher kerfuffle. Responding to an invitation from his interviewee on “Real Time,” Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, to visit the politician’s home state and “work in the fields with us,” Maher retorted in mock indignation, “Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a house nigger.”

The media have gone pretty crazy about all three moments of comedians going “too far,” with calls for all three to be fired, and even for Griffin to be prosecuted. The reactions have been depressingly predictable. On the two specifically anti-Trump pieces, the political left babbles about 1st amendment rights and the right harrumphs about respect for the Presidency: precisely the opposite reactions to posters showing former President Obama being lynched, or to the despicable Ted Nugent’s obvious threats against Mr. Obama (be it noted: I never thought Nugent ever intended to do anything about those threats—he’s too much of a cowardly blowhard—but threats they undoubtedly were).

Where to begin? Let’s start with the whole “did s/he have the right to do this” debate. The answer is, as it often is, “yes and no.” (Shoutout to Curmie’s students in Asian theatre classes over the years.) That is, all three are unquestionably examples of protected speech, whether the VFW thinks so or not. Colbert, Griffin, and Maher all had the legal right to do what they did. But such protections don’t mean actions have no consequences, and they don’t render an action ethical just because it’s legal.

Frankly, I’m not terribly surprised by any of these incidents. Colbert used to be funny because he played an invented character—a stereotype of his actual political opposition—so well. Since switching to speaking in something resembling his own voice, however, he’s become nearly as boring as he’s become boorish. In other words, Colbert probably caused the least ripple of the three because he did what we expected of him—not that we were shocked by the others, but Colbert’s schtik has become cruder in recent months. (N.B. Neither Colbert nor Curmie is unaware of the fact that in an Internet age the late-night time slot no longer means a lot in terms of the final audience.) And it isn’t as funny anymore. It’s intriguing, too, that the outcry from the left is about the alleged homophobia of the joke rather than the vulgarity of the insult to the POTUS. Colbert didn’t exactly apologize—nor, I suppose, should he—for delivering exactly what his audience wanted, but he did say that he “would change a few words that were cruder than they needed to be.” Uh… yeah. Also, Colbert is a major star, and male. He opened the next night with a rather smug “I’m your host, Stephen Colbert. Still? I am still the host? I’m still the host!!” He’ll be fine, whether he should be or not.

Griffin’s case is, to me, far more interesting. Her “offense” consisted only of visual images, “across the line,” perhaps, but it’s difficult to believe she ever meant an actual threat to President Trump. There’s nothing more graphic about the photos of Griffin and the dummy head than about virtually any decent production of Macbeth in the last 400+ years or The Bacchae in 2400+ (Curmie came to this thought independently, but his netpal Jack Marshall got the Macbeth allusion in print first…). Griffin apologized in what has become a predictable mix of enforced obligation, self-serving spin, and a smidgeon of actual repentance. She’s right about one thing, though. Her career took a (short-term) hit. One certainly suspects that a has-been-who-never-really-was like Griffin took a chance: she had to know that the Toddler-in-Chief is pathologically incapable of not taking to Twitter at the slightest provocation. Usually, he embarrasses himself. This time, though, he was justified, and his usual ineptitude serves only to underscore the significance of his getting one right for a change. Yes, (as many anti-Trumpsters have argued) it would be just as awkward for young Barron to hear his father’s disgusting pussy-grabbing comments as to see Dad’s seemingly severed head (knowing it wasn’t real), but that doesn’t mean Griffin’s publicity stunt was ethical.

Kathy Griffin should have been fired from New Year’s Eve coverage for her drunken incoherence last time out. She hasn’t said anything funny in about a decade. But CNN stuck with her. Of course, they had the legal right to fire her now for this little fracas, but it would be stupid to do so. So, of course, they did. She’s a D-lister. She’s female. And they’re cowards. Griffin’s career may take a short-term hit, but Curmie suspects she’ll get extra points for naughtiness in some quarters: she’ll have a different target audience, but she’ll be fine. If not, then the predictable leftie whining about gender discrimination may actually have merit this time.

Bill Maher’s case is the most intriguing of all. The torches and pitchforks crowd is after him for using the “n-word.” This despite the fact that he applied it to himself, and that it was (whether Maher knew it or not) a literary reference to Gone with the Wind, a fact virtually none of the breathless press coverage deigned to mention. There’s something stagey about the delivery… had he primed Senator Sasse to mention working in the fields so he could come back with a clever retort? Could be. But what matters is that Maher is both more innocent and more guilty than Colbert or Griffin. Assuming the line was truly an ad lib, it’s far less pre-meditated than a scripted monologue or planned photo shoot, and therefore more forgivable. And, to the extent that it’s a literary allusion (and an apt one, given the set-up line), rendering it accurately matters.

But still, “nigger,” however and by whomever applied, is a word used in the 21st century by white people in only two ways: quoted clinically/journalistically (as, for example, in this piece) or to shock. Maher clearly chose the second of these paths, and a veteran host/performer such as himself cannot have done so without a pretty good idea of what would happen. Yes, Maher fancies himself a lot smarter than he is, and yes, he relishes the role of gadfly. Still, there are unwritten but universally understood rules you just don’t break, and this is one of them.

There are those, including Jack Marshall, who think that Maher, who has described female politicians with whom he disagrees as “cunts,” and who has shown more than a little Islamophobia over the years (and gotten away with it) may be in deeper trouble than he anticipated this time because whereas it’s okay to insult some constituencies (Republicans, religious minorities…), it’s not okay to do so to African-Americans. Maybe. Maher, who promised never to apologize for being politically incorrect, of course did indeed apologize—sort of—this time around. Whereas that marks him as, shall we say, a little less than a person of integrity, in purely pragmatic terms it may be enough to weather the storm. HBO will decide based on the only thing that matters to them: whether they think the gaffe (if that’s what it was) will cost them viewers, or whether any publicity is good publicity. Curmie’s guess is the latter.

What makes all three of these cases interesting is that they seem to fall into a grey area. The perpetrators all did something dumb, but not—taken in isolation—so dumb that public censure and/or firing was literally their bosses’ only recourse. All of the comedians in question engaged in vulgarity of language or visual image not really to make a point, but rather to call attention to themselves. And their respective unwanted (we presume) notoriety could cost them. However, all three (especially the two men) are niche entertainers: they built their careers on a cadre of hard-core followers, not on engaging a wide spectrum of society. They’re Lenny Bruce, not Bob Hope, or even George Carlin. Their fans will remain their fans. And with Griffin—the (ahem) poorest of the three—checking in with a net worth of about $20 million, all for being not very funny and rather dumb, Curmie doubts that he’ll lose any sleep wondering whether they can scrounge a crust of bread to make it through the night.

A Pragmatic Case for a Jill Stein Protest Vote

Assuming he finds the time, Curmie is going to write a series of three pieces about Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Presidency of the United States. Today is the easy one, to ease Curmie back into writing: why voting third-party is absolutely legitimate (for some of us). The other two aren’t harder, but they’ll take a longer and more sophisticated argument: why Clinton’s very real ethical failings make her unsupportable (except to stop a narcissistic imbecile like Donald Trump); and why the previous election results we ought to be afraid of aren’t from 2000, but from 1968. But… on to the business at hand.

Jill Stein of the Green Party

Curmie just read another article, this one by a smug little fart named Sean Colarossi, proclaiming that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump. Curmie is only going to say this once, so pay attention: HORSESHIT.

First off, in pure mathematical terms, the argument just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for Donald Trump. A vote for Jill Stein is not. If Curmie votes for Trump (come have him committed if he ever suggests that as a reasonable course of action), then Trump gets one more vote than Clinton. If Curmie votes for Stein, then Trump and Clinton remain tied. If you want to say it’s “half a vote for Trump,” go for it. It isn’t as catchy, but at least it’s honest. Then again, honesty has never been a strong suit for anyone or anything associated with the Clintons.

Secondly, it is wildly presumptive (another specialty of the Clintons) to suggest that the default position of any voter, including a registered Democrat, should be blind support of any Democratic nominee. Curmie was registered as an independent for over thirty years, and still thinks of himself in those terms; although he hasn’t voted for a Republican he didn’t know personally in over a decade, that’s because the Republican candidates have been so uniformly awful, not out of any abiding love for the Democrats. Has Hillary Clinton done anything to earn my vote? Well, I agree with her most of the time—or, at least I think I do: she’s changed positions on so many issues so often (the TPP, the minimum wage, gay marriage… need I go on?) that were I of a cynical disposition (perish the thought!) I might suggest that Candidate Obama was pretty accurate in declaring in 2008 that she’ll say anything to get elected. But really the principal reason that Curmie became a Democrat (other than the obvious fact that the Texas GOP is the strongest argument imaginable for joining an opposition party) was to vote for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the ’08 primary and caucus.

Certainly HRC herself has made no attempt to sway Bernie Sanders supporters such as myself to her side. Indeed, quite the contrary. Naming the despicable Debbie Wasserman Schultz as honorary campaign manager after leaked e-mails prove that Schultz had violated all ethical standards to attempt to subvert the Sanders campaign translates as follows to the Sanders faithful: “Yes. My minion, while pretending to be an honest broker, was in fact actively conspiring against your candidate. She had to resign her position with the DNC once what everyone who was paying attention already knew to be true was confirmed by hard evidence. So I hired her into a top position in my campaign. Fuck you. And vote for me.” You know what? No.

But the real reason a vote for Jill Stein is absolutely legitimate for me to do is that I live in Texas. The Clintonphiliac scolds apparently don’t realize that not only do we not live in a de facto democracy, we don’t even live in one on paper. Popular vote doesn’t elect the POTUS—ask President Gore. So my vote for someone other than a major party candidate means literally nothing in terms of electing or not electing Tribblehead. Literally. Nothing.

Mitt Romney, who was a terrible candidate, won Texas in 2012 by close to 16 points, or over one and a quarter million votes. Local Dems got excited recently that Clinton trailed in one poll last month by only 8 points. That’s still pretty much a blowout, and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight site currently has Trump leading Texas by 11, with a 93% chance of winning the state. (Interestingly, right now—4:00 pm CDT on July 30—Silver’s “Polls only” projection suggests that Clinton will win the popular vote but that Trump has a 50.1% chance of winning the election; his other two projections—“Polls Plus” and “NowCast,” both predict a Clinton victory, the latter by a very narrow margin.)

More to the point, states tend to trend at the same time, responding to the latest news. In other words, if Texas Republicans start abandoning the nominee, or if Texas independents flock to Clinton, so will those in Iowa, Florida, Virginia, and other places where there’s actually a contest. If Texas is even close—let’s say within 3 points—then lots of other states will have already fallen in line behind Clinton. That is, for Texas to be close, it would have to move 8 points in Clinton’s direction. If we move all other states even half that far in Clinton’s direction, then in the NowCast projection she she’d win all the states she currently leads in (CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, HA, IL, MA, MD, ME (3 of 4 EVs), MI, MN, NJ, NM, NY, OR, PA, RI, VA, VT, WA, WI—a total 268 of the 270 she’d need to win), plus all these others in which she trails by 4 points or less: FL, GA, IA, NC, NV, OH (another 90 electoral votes). And that’s just if the rest of the country moves only half as far toward Clinton as Texas would have to do just to be competitive. Throw in AZ, MO, NH, SC, and the one remaining ME district if you want to count places that are closer to a Clinton victory than TX is to Clinton competitiveness. So, if the entire country shifted in Clinton’s direction enough to make Texas even close, she’d already have close to 400 electoral votes without Texas.

The bottom line: if Clinton wins Texas, she won’t need it; if she needs Texas, she won’t win it. So any vote for anyone other than Trump will have the same effect to keeping him out of the Oval Office: zero.

Don’t get me wrong. If I still lived in New Hampshire or Iowa, I’d be all about preventing the Bellowing Yam from even sniffing the Presidency. Even if I still lived in New York, which Clinton ought to win by double digits pretty easily, I’d vote for her just in case the campaign got a little too complacent. But because of the idiotic, archaic, vestigial, Electoral College system, my Presidential vote makes no difference whatsoever. That leaves me free to express a little… yes, protest. I will vote, but not for the embodiment of political cronyism, privilege, and corruption that is Hillary Clinton. It is a small protest, to be sure, but as I am neither wealthy not well-connected, it’s all I have.

Is Jill Stein an ideal candidate? No. There are plenty of issues on which I disagree with her. But she’s smart, she’s a grown-up, and she appears to be fundamentally honest. She won’t win (duh!), but there’s at least an outside chance that she could attract enough votes to have the 2020 Green candidate get federal funds and a spot on the debate stage. This, too, is a long shot, but it’s still far more likely that Hillary Clinton needing Texas and getting it.

And don’t you dare blame Curmie and those like him if Clinton’s candidacy implodes. My choice is not ill-informed or irresponsible, nor is it founded on “self-righteousness.”  If we end up with the Xenophobic Twatwaffle as POTUS, we can place the blame squarely on the shoulders of, in increasing order of culpability: the media, Democratic voters who nominated a candidate with a double-digit net unfavorable rating, the corrupt and incompetent DNC, and… wait for it… Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Gentle Reader, if you live in a swing state, I implore you to vote for Hillary Clinton to save us from the scariest major party candidate ever. If you live in a blue state, I’d urge you to consider not taking anything for granted. But if, like Curmie, you live in a state that Clinton has no chance of taking if the election is close, then you be you. Vote for Clinton, vote for Stein, write in Sanders, whatever you choose. Just don’t stay home (down-ballot candidates need your support), and please don’t vote for the Screaming Combover.

A Defense of Melania Trump. Sort of.

It has been far too long since Curmie set fingers to keyboard, and there have been plenty of things to write about. Yes, I’ve been busy, but I really need to get back to writing. So here we go, with my first essay in months: a defense (of sorts) of Melania Trump.

Yes, you read that correctly. It is true that Curmie has a (hopefully) well-earned reputation as a scourge of plagiarists: one of my former students even posted a Facebook status that it was clear Melania had never taken one of my courses; that post now has dozens of “likes” from other alumni and a handful of colleagues. We’ll just avoid discussing the Rick-roll altogether, shall we? And it is true that I despise everything about the Bloviating Tribblehead, including his idiot trophy wife. But Melania has become the butt of countless jokes, memes, and other forms of public humiliation (a couple of which I have graciously attached here) for plagiarizing a paragraph or so from, of all people, Michelle Obama, when she spoke about her husband at the Democratic National Convention eight years ago. And no rational person thinks Melania herself is actually guilty.

Yes, she spoke those words. And yes, they were first spoken by someone else. And no, they were not in any way attributed in the speech to anyone else. But, seriously, does anyone really think that Melania, a poorly educated, dim-witted woman speaking in what is at best her second language, actually wrote the speech? There is a distant possibility that Michelle Obama wrote hers, but Melania? Not a chance. And what’s telling is that everybody with an IQ above room temperature knows that. Melania Trump is a puppet, spouting a speech-writer’s words without any real pretense that the ideas expressed, let alone the expression itself, are original with her.

The section in question is pretty much boilerplate (after all, if you’re going to plagiarize, make sure you steal the part about values and morals):

From a young age my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise; that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily life.

That is a lesson that I continue to pass along to our son, and we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.

Even a savvier woman than Melania Trump—and there are millions upon millions of them in this country alone—could be forgiven for not recognizing that this particular version of pabulum is just a little too familiar-sounding.

But it’s not the lazy and dishonest speechwriter who’s going to catch flak for this colossal gaffe: it’s the person who uttered those portentous words in public. What’s telling about this situation isn’t that Melania Trump “plagiarized” in front of tens of millions of television viewers. It’s the response of the Trump campaign, which revealed itself once again as disingenuous, arrogant, and inept. Indeed, the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency is about the only thing that could ever convince Curmie to vote for Hillary Clinton. The two presumptive nominees are equally narcissistic, equally corrupt, equally hubristic. But at least Hillary has some relevant experience, is less overtly racist, and is… what’s that word, again? Oh, yeah: sane.

Truly, the excuses gushing out of the Trump camp are a sight to behold. There’s a good summary at Vox. Let’s see: there’s campaign manager Paul Manafort’s attempt to shift the blame from the culprit to the Hillary Clinton campaign, who, in Manafort’s paranoid delusion, somehow invented the obvious and unmistakable evidence that the speech wasn’t original.

There’s Chris Christie, who lost whatever shreds of dignity he may once have clung to by suggesting that because “93%” of the speech was original, there wasn’t plagiarism. I’ve never agreed with Christie politically, and I strongly suspect he’s more than a little dishonest, but this level of utter stupidity is simply mind-boggling. If a student, even a fall-term freshman, hands me a paper that is 7% plagiarized, that’s an F not merely for the paper, but for the course. (N.B., I’m talking here about the intentional appropriation of someone else’s words with an attempt to deceive, not about what I call “technical plagiarism,” which is a product of ignorance, inept high school teachers, and the quantification fetish that infests American secondary—and post-secondary—education, distracting teachers and students alike from things like proper writing in order to pay obeisance to the Great God Accountability… but that’s a rant for another day.)

There’s the defense by the insufferable Katrina Pierson that the ideas are conventional. Of course they are! But the phrasing is not. A significant chunk of the speech was plagiarized. Full stop. And no intentional obfuscation is going to change that. (Well, it might in the mind of a gung-ho Trump supporter, who is, after all, a moron by definition.)

Pierson also put forward the obviously true and equally obviously irrelevant assertion that English isn’t Melania’s first language… apparently that’s an excuse, somehow. Saying the wrong word in off-the-cuff remarks: that’s a situation in which a speaker might legitimately claim to have made an honest mistake. Full-blown plagiarism in scripted remarks? Nope.

And finally, there’s what Vox writer Sarah Kliff calls the “My Little Pony” defense: a variation on Pierson’s conventionality argument. Lots of people talk about work, you see. This one is advanced by GOP strategist Sean Spicer, who may indeed be too stupid to understand that specific phrasing matters. Lots of people contemplate suicide, too, but if you say “to be, or not to be,” you’d better not be claiming the words are original. Side note: Curmie wrote the previous sentence, then happened across a Verge piece by Adi Robertson, who not only adds a couple more excuses and excuse-makers to the list (more on them in as second), but also, in response to Manafort’s claim that “What she did was use words that are common words,” writes: “You know what else are common words? ‘To,’ ‘be,’ ‘or,’ ‘not,’ ‘to,’ and ‘be.’” So people can come up with the same idea independently. But notice that even though Robertson and Curmie referenced the same line from Hamlet, we did so precisely because that line is so recognizable, and we did so differently. (It might also be worth noting that Kliff’s article was posted literally 8 minutes before Robertson’s and uses most of the same examples, but—once again—differently.)

So… Robertson adds Jason Miller’s claim that “Melania’s team of writers took notes on her life’s inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking.” Seriously, Melania, with friends like these… In some instances she was saying what she really thinks? This is a defense?

So where does that leave us? Was there plagiarism here? Absolutely, and of the worst kind: not quite word for word. In other words, the perpetrator knew he or she was breaking the rules, and (one presumes) made a feeble attempt to avoid detection. Curmie had a student a few years ago who copied a large chunk of his paper from one of “those” websites, then changed every fourth word or so in order to go undetected. It might have fooled whatever website or app assured him he was going to get away with it; it didn’t fool Curmie: there were just too many strange locutions… took me about 45 seconds to find the website in question.

The correct response is simple: “Everyone knows that most speeches at a convention like this are crafted by speechwriters from the thoughts of the speaker. This is standard practice, and this case is also extraordinary because Mrs. Trump is not a native English-speaker. We therefore relied on a staffer to write her speech. We understand that parts of the speech appear to have been lifted from a speech by Michelle Obama in 2008. The staffer has been fired, and we apologize to Mrs. Obama and to the American people.”

Or, as former Mitt Romney campaign manager Stuart Stevens put it, “In the process of helping Mrs. Trump, writers mistakenly included unoriginal material. We apologize & it won’t happen again.”

But that would be admitting a mistake, and that’s not been allowed in American politics since the Carter administration. The fact is that Melania Trump is just a dupe, betrayed by someone on hubby’s staff. But, as Stevens also tweeted, “The problem with Mrs. Trump's speech is less that it happened & more campaign trying to deny it did. One is a mistake; other character flaw.” It was said of Watergate that the uproar was more about the cover-up than the crime. So there’s another indictment of the Trump campaign: they don’t learn from history.

The Media Has Put a Finger on the Scale

That the mainstream media has been in the tank for both current front-runners for their respective parties’ presidential nomination can now be taken as a given. The xenophobic Tribble-head was and is an entirely media-driven creation, with nearly $2 billion (yes, billion with a “b”) worth of free media coverage. That’s 46% of the entire field of 17 candidates, two and a half times as much as Hillary Clinton, 75% more than all the Democrats combined, and 64% more than all the other Republicans combined. The despicable Les Moonves, CEO of CBS, sums it all up for us. Speaking of the Trump candidacy, he said “It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.” And that’s all that little turd cares about.

On the Democratic side, it was more a matter of timing. As Adam H. Johnson puts it,

Who is and isn’t a “serious” candidate in our modern public relations-driven democracy is largely tautological. Whoever the news media say is important early on typically becomes the most important. This leads to a feedback loop that anoints the “frontrunner” in the “invisible primary” where success is measured by name recognition, money raised, party insider support and a host of “serious” accomplishments, all before the most essential of feedback has been provided: actual voting.

And pre-Iowa numbers are even more staggering than the cumulative totals, which show that roughly 70% of the free media coverage on the Democratic side has gone to Clinton.

The earlier the primary or caucus, the more driven it is by name recognition. So when, a little over a month before Iowa, Hillary Clinton had received 11 times more airtime than Bernie Sanders, that’s significant. (Joe Biden’s decision not to run got six times as much coverage as the entirety of the Sanders campaign as of late last November.) To be fair, the HRC campaign still got less than half the attention of the Drumpf.

The media was also swift to declare—in headlines—Clinton the winner of every debate, even though Sanders gained ground among actual voters after most of them.

The Washington Post did its part by running 16 negative stories about Sanders in 16 hours, oh so coincidentally in the period Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) describes as “includ[ing] the crucial Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan, and the next morning’s spin.” A convincing Clinton win in Michigan would probably have ended the Sanders insurgency. But pollsters ended up with considerable egg on their respective faces when Sanders didn’t in fact, lose by 20+ points, but won.

Indeed, because of that victory in Michigan (and subsequent comfortable wins in Idaho and Utah), Sanders remains a potential if unlikely nominee. He’s not the favorite, but it’s not out the question that he might yet get more pledged delegates than Clinton will. Surely even Debbie Wasserman Schultz isn’t so inept or corrupt (or Hillary Clinton so megalomaniacal or narcissistic) as to deny the nomination to a candidate with more actually elected delegates… right? Right?

Of course, the likes of Marcos Moulitsas are dreadfully fearful that voters might actually support someone other than the insider candidate, so he proclaimed on March 4 that if Sanders hadn’t closed the gap on Clinton by March 15, he’d forbid anything negative to be said about Clinton on his site (the Daily Kos) thereafter. Moulitsas is an idiot but not uninformed; he knew full well that the states voting on the 15th favored Clinton, but that Sanders was likely to take the majority of the next eight. Depending on who’s counting, Sanders needs to win about 57 or 58% of the post-March 15 delegates to get a majority (leaving superdelegates out of the mix for the moment). That’s exactly what he did on March 22. Today there are caucuses in Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington. Sanders is expected to do well in all three states. Will he win a sufficient majority of the remaining pledged delegates? Barring a major intervening event, probably not. But such events do happen, and it’s not at all unreasonable for him to stick around a while longer. (Remember, it was June when Clinton dropped out of the 2008 race, needing a far higher percentage of remaining delegates than Sanders needs now.)

But the New York Times has had enough of this democracy stuff. They’ve got a coronation to plan. In a piece by Amy Chozick and Trip Gabriel published yesterday, Bernie Sanders might as well never have existed. Clinton, you see, is “turn[ing] her attention to a general election campaign.” Sanders, who has well over 40% of the pledged delegates thus far awarded, is irrelevant. They don’t even entertain the notion that Clinton might not get the nomination. To be fair, they’re equal opportunity incompetents: no Republican candidate other than the former reality TV buffoon is really considered, and only Ted Cruz is even mentioned.

Inevitability and electability have been the twin pillars of the Clinton campaign since the beginning. The former may just succeed as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The oft-repeated mantra, “I like Bernie, but he can’t win,” thus takes on a double meaning, with different responses. A lot of people seem to think that the unlikelihood of a Sanders nomination is a reason to vote for Clinton. Sorry, but that’s just stupid. If you prefer Clinton, by all means vote for her, but “he can’t win” becomes relevant in a primary only if there are more than two candidates in a winner-take-all state (you might prefer Kasich but will vote for Cruz to stop Trump), or if the unelectability extends to the general election (you prefer Sanders, but don’t think he can beat Trump, whereas Clinton can).

Of course, the media have been rather scrupulous about keeping actual numbers about electability out of the headlines. Why? Well, because Sanders currently annihilates Trump by 17.5 points. Clinton wins, too, but by more than six fewer points. Sanders also fares 5.5 points better against Cruz and 7.5 better against Kasich (the difference between a narrow win and a fairly substantial loss for the Democrats).

But what’s really interesting about the Times article is this: “Mr. Trump has shown a particular weakness among female voters, who favored Mrs. Clinton 55 percent to 35 percent in a New York Times/CBS News poll released this week, twice the gender gap of the 2012 presidential election, when President Obama defeated Mitt Romney.” Interesting. Trouble is, Curmie actually bothered to look at the source, the published version of those poll results. There’s not a thing there that separates male and female voters. The polls may have said precisely what Chozik and Gabriel claim, but the documentation they provide doesn’t say so. This would be slipshod journalism at the undergrad level, let alone for someone working for the freaking New York Times.

That poll, unlike the article which uses it as evidence, does recognize that the Senator from Vermont is still alive and well, and his campaign is at least the former if not the latter, as well. Accordingly, Sanders and Clinton are both matched up against their likely GOP opposition. And Sanders beats Trump by 15 vs. 10 for Clinton; interestingly, Sanders/Cruz and Sanders/Kasich were not listed as possibilities, at least in the published data. It does say something about American politics that the two leading candidates have positive/negative ratings of -33 (Trump) and -21 (Clinton). Meanwhile, the two candidates who would stand the best chance of beating the opposition candidate in November, Sanders and Kasich, are ignored. Welcome to American democracy.

But you know who does divide male and female voters? Quinnipiac. In their latest poll, Clinton does beat Trump handily among women voters, 16 points (although only by 2 points among white women). Sanders wins by 29. Yes, 29. Tell me again about how women are all about Clinton and only Clinton. More tellingly, isn’t it interesting that the Times article cites evidence that may or may not exist, but fails to mention even more overwhelming support for Sanders.

It is no secret that Curmie is pro-Sanders and anti-Clinton. Both, independently. Not pro-Sanders because anti-Clinton. Not anti-Clinton because pro-Sanders. So those who disagree will no doubt think this is all sour grapes. Part of it may be. But I prefer both my politicians and my journalists to be at least reasonably honest. That is not happening in this campaign.

The Case of the Disappearing Swastikas

Perhaps the easiest way to be roused from my writing torpor is to write a comment that turns into a post of its own. I know it’s been since January that I’ve written anything here, but I always managed to find a reason not to find the time… plus, it’s spring break here in Curmieville, so that’s a good opportunity to get some writing done.

The impetus for this commentary, then, was a post by Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall over at Ethics Alarms. (As usual, Curmiphiles are encouraged to check out his page.) Jack has a way of discovering articles I wish I’d gotten to first. Anyway…

This is a scene from the movie.  I’m guessing Tappan Zee High School

doesn’t have choristers that look quite like this.

Bob Pritchard, the superintendent of schools in Orangetown, NY, intervened in the Tappan Zee High production of Mel Brooks’s The Producers this week, caving to pressure from the ubiquitous “concerned parents” and removing the swastikas from the musical’s signature song, “Springtime for Hitler.” Mr. Pritchard is a coward and a fool. Seriously, what legitimate educator would argue that “there is no context in a public high school where a swastika is appropriate”? To cite some examples noted by Jack: how about a history book? a class project? a screening of “Schindler’s List”? a production of The Sound of Music?

Still, Jack ultimately decided that removing the swastikas was the least bad of a host of bad options. Here’s where we disagree. Below, the last 90% or so of my comment on his post:

First, let me confess to ignorance of the stage version of The Producers. I know the film, of course, but being neither a big musical theatre guy nor made of money, I’ve never actually seen the play. Assuming it to be substantially similar to the film, therefore, is for me (but not for those more informed) a risky proposition.

It is not clear whether the school’s administration formally signed off on the choice of play, but de facto they did: the rights and royalties for a musical will cost—depending on a variety of factors such as venue size, number of performances, and ticket prices—hundreds or (more likely) thousands of dollars, and no high school theatre director can just write a check on a school account for that amount of money. Expenditures of that size need approval.

So here’s where I agree with your point that cultural illiteracy was very much at play from the beginning of this saga. I’m not suggesting that every high school administrator should have seen the movie or the play, but certainly the “Springtime for Hitler” schtik has long since passed into the public consciousness. I was too young (in junior high, perhaps?) to have seen the film on its first run, but I knew about the campy production number long before I actually saw the film when I was in high school or college. Similarly, I know that “I will take what is mine with fire and blood” is a ”Game of Thrones” reference without ever having picked up one of the books or tuned in to the television show. A competent administrator would at the very least have known what s/he was signing off on. Or… you know… asked: that’s an option, apparently.

There are, as you say, many legitimate reasons why this is not a good choice for a high school production, plus one you didn’t mention: it’s very male-heavy, especially in the leads, and most high schools (or universities, for that matter) have a lot more good women than good men in the talent pool.

But the show was approved, implicitly if not explicitly, and, having done so, the administration is to my mind, ethically bound to stand behind the production except in cases of utter outrageousness that are not mandated or at the very least supported by the script. Actually, this one is a tough call in some ways: unless there’s something in the stage version that isn’t in the film, there’s nothing that demands swastikas. And I suspect that whereas the design concept might be compromised by the administration’s intervention, removing the offending objects could be done with relatively little disruption to the rehearsal process in purely pragmatic terms (i.e., outside the realm of aesthetics, ethics, or copyright law). On the other hand, using them is a completely appropriate choice.

Should the director simply have acquiesced? Maybe, but I don’t think so. I’ve been in academic theatre (admittedly at a different level) as a student or a faculty member (or, during grad school, as both at once) for over four decades, and that’s long enough to recognize the thin edge of the wedge. This time it’s swastikas. Next time it will be the word “skank”, or a little authenticity in the choreography in an Elvis-inspired musical, or a very funny, sweet and thoroughly asexual “gay scene,”or—Allah forbid!—a totally innocuous musical in which the central characters happen to be Muslims.

As a practicing theatre artist, I am well aware of the power of symbols, and I do not wish to dismiss the concerns of those who are offended by the image. But the problem with The Producers is not, cannot be, swastikas. The entire scene is intended to be a farce, an idea so inane that no sentient spectator of the play-within-a-play could think it worthy of staging. Our heroes are trying to produce a flop, after all. As you point out, Jack, context matters, and reducing the symbol of the Third Reich to a kitschy backdrop goes a long way to deflating its power. And there is no way any rational person could view the use of Nazi iconography in this play as in any way endorsing Hitler. Does the scene make fun of the Holocaust? No. No, it does not. I kinda think Mel Brooks wouldn’t be the guy to do that.

We can make a case that the play should never have been approved to begin with. We can stipulate that the changes being demanded are probably not that difficult to make. But I still think it’s a bad call, born of cowardice rather than principle.

At its best, theatre, like any other art form, challenges the spectators, incites responses, asks more questions than it answers. I am fond of reminding my students that, linguistically, “aesthetic” is the opposite of “anaesthetic.” Even at the high school level, theatre provides the possibility of engaging in actual dialogue about things that matter, such as, for example, the symbology associated with one of the most repressive and unhuman regimes in history.

The superintendent, though well-intentioned, is ultimately saying, in effect: “You can do this play, but I forbid you to do it correctly.” His decision also capitulates to what amounts to a heckler’s veto. How much better would it be to stage the play the way the director and students choose, and then to have a post-show discussion about the decision to include swastikas: why did you decide to go ahead? would you have the same objections to swastikas if we were doing The Sound of Music or The Moon Is Down? the play isn’t really about Nazis at all (it is not, in fact, “a satirical musical about Adolf Hitler,” even if the idiot on Channel 2 says otherwise), so a). why get so upset, or b). why not just tone it down? (And so on.)

Recognizing and respecting the perspectives of others is central to pedagogy, to a democratic society, and to adulthood. This is a tougher call than most, but in the end, I’m going to side with more speech rather than less, even if some people are upset. As you say, Jack, we live in a time in which “foes of humor, satire, controversy, and even free speech itself are causing Americans to self-censor and be hesitant to utter anything but bland sentiments and consensus opinions.” To me, that’s a rallying cry to create art fearlessly. Of course, I’m not the one taking the angry phonecalls.